Work Programme In Trouble?
Submitted by Steve Adams on Fri, 09/12/2011 - 4:19pm
It looks like at least one prime may be having money problems. Starting this week one of the East of England providers is refusing to pay travel expenses to people on the Work Programme who visit their centre for less than two hours.
I know margins are very tight for WP Providers and they are all trying to keep costs to a minimum, but going from that to ‘Work Programme is in Trouble’ is a bit of a ‘leap’ isn’t it.
I think we're getting the first indicators of the Work Programme:
Jobs programme ‘hangs by thread’
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7048024a-1b48-11e1-85f8-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz...
Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation think-tank, said: “The OBR is predicting that the numbers claiming unemployment benefits will be 460,000 higher in 2014 than they thought when the Work Programme was commissioned.
“The combination of rising caseloads, falling labour demand, and the shift to 100 per cent outcome-based funding for providers is dire news for Work Programme viability."
Thankfully creaming and parking isn't going on. Nobody would think to do the bare minimum with their harder to place clients and concentrate the majority of their efforts on those that are easiest to place as and when they come in because their outcome targets are high. Mr Grayling said it wouldn't happen and, thank God, it hasn't.
Someone will always take the short term thinking of parking and creaming, but for longer term viability this is a nonsense and I am sure that the most sucessful providers will not be so stupid.
I may be naive but I cant imagine primes are in dire financial trouble either as I thought part of the criteria was how much money they had to bankroll. Depending on the model through the chain though many of my colleagues anticipated substantial supply chain movement within the first 6 months.
I wouldnt want to be behind targets on this though as I imagine playing catch up would become almost impossible.
Yes, I think that changing the funding model was done partly to stop the lazy 'parking and creaming' providers who got away with it under FND.
The big boys like Serco and G4S will be fine - they have buckets of cash. The real losers of the Work Programme will be the smaller sub-contractors whose margins are extremely tight and who need to be much more competitive and result driven if they want to continue working for the Prime contractors.
Of course though, if they aren't getting people back into work, then obviously they don't deserve the contract.